Things to do in London this weekend (9-10 August)

The world’s largest celebration for LGBTQ+ people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American and Middle Eastern heritage, UK Black Pride celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and around 20,000 attendees are expected to descend on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for another big party and protest. The festivities will include performers, community stall-holders, food and drink, and special workshops. The theme for this year has yet to be announced at the time of writing, but organisers are promising the “biggest and boldest” edition of UK Black Pride yet.

Masterminded by promoter Labryinth, Labyrinth On The Thames will see different artists from the world of electronic music take over the Old Royal Naval College (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) for six days of unmissable performances. Three headliners have been confirmed so far; South African DJ and producer Black Coffee kicks off the double-weekender with his mix of house, soul and traditional African rhythms on Thursday July 31 and Friday August 1, before legendary techno DJ Solomun plays a marathon 5-hour set on August 8, Australian tech-house producer Fisher headlines on Saturday August 9 and London-based dance music label Anjunadeep – whose artists include Lane 8, Yotto, and Dusky – curates the line-up on Sunday August 10. 

Elephant on Lower Clapton Road – once the statuesque Elephant’s Head, but more recently an Irish pub, then a forgettable bar, then boresome brasserie – has peeled away various refits to reveal a striking Victorian boozer. Of course, it’s not really a pub anymore; there is table service, menus, and a very good wine list, but to call it anything other than a restaurant would be doing it a disservice. With ex-Manteca chef Francesco Sarvonio in the kitchen, the food is of a southern Italian persuasion and not a single dish falters. A Sopranos Sunday luncheon-worthy dish of ziti genovese ragu, al dente pasta combined with braised beef and onions, sporting a toothsome breadcrumb topping and hunks of unspecified cheese, is perfectly simple, at once light and heavy. 

These days, Brixton Academy is an essential part of London’s cultural landscape. But there was a time when it was just a derelict old cinema building. In Alex Urwin’s play, inspired by the memoir Live at Brixton Academy by Simon Parkes, we watch as the space transforms into something sacred. This is Parkes’s story: a thalidomide baby who bought the cinema for just £1 at the age of 23. Directed by Bronagh Lagan, the experience is akin to watching a gig. With cables curling around the stage’s exterior, graffiti decorating the walls, and a tapestry of old flyers lining the floor, the room buzzes with raw energy. It’s a powerful reminder of how places and people shape culture. 

A reboot of The Naked Gun has been a long time coming. Luckily, Liam Neeson has understood the assignment. The Irish actor takes the lead as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr, the cop son of Leslie Nielsen's iconic Police Squad! detective, in a hilariously punchy sequel. Co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand serve up a laugh-a-minute script, bursting with the sort of sight gags, non sequiturs and wordplay that made the cop parody such a defining addition to the comedy genre. In the thick of reboot culture, The Naked Gun is a prime example of filmmakers taking a nostalgic piece of cinema and making good on its legacy. It honours the humour above all, and you’d be hard-pushed to find a funnier film this year.

Edinburgh isn't the only place with a bursting, brilliant fringe, and indeed, as the Scottish capital’s iconic annual event becomes ever more expensive, the once scrappy outsider Camden Fringe looks ever more like a serious alternative for the London-based. Returning for its nineteenth edition, it’s smaller than Edinburgh by a long shot, but still boasts hundreds of events all over Camden, taking in everything from the expected stand-up sets and experimental theatre to kids’ shows, dance, and even magic. Runs tend to be for a night or two rather than the entire month, and prices are bargain basement by London standards: many shows are less than a tenner, none are much more than that. 

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Cocktails in the City, a pop-up festival where cocktail-loving Londoners flock to Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square Gardens, which are taken over some of the city’s very best bars, mixologists, and booze brands. Enjoy a complimentary welcome drink on arrival, then start exploring creative concoctions from a star-studded roster of top mixologists. Experimental Cocktail Club, Vesper Bar, Archive & Myth, and Viajante87 are just a handful of the celebrated London bars on the line-up.  

Award-winning and influential rapper, DJ, and record label head Skepta is not only bringing his Big Smoke festival back for a second year, and it’s expanding too. This year, the event will take over Crystal Palace Bowl for two days, where the man himself will deliver a full-scale performance and will be joined on the line-up by a mix of stars, including headliner Central Cee, rising stars Chy Cartier and SkylaTylaa, and grime legends like JME, Frisco and Chip.

Love sushi, dumplings or noodles? Inamo’s got you covered. This high-tech spot in Soho or Covent Garden lets you order from interactive tabletops, play over 20 games while you wait and even doodle on your table. Then it’s all you can eat pan-Asian dishes like Sichuan chicken, red dragon rolls and Korean wings with bottomless drinks. Usually £113.35, now just £33 or £26 if you're in early at the weekend!

Get Inamo’s best ever bottomless food & drink brunch from only £26 with Time Out Offers.

Hollywood stars don’t come as classy as Sophia Loren. This programme of films curates by the BFI, Cinecittà and Cinema Department of the Ministry of Culture of Italy, celebrates oven 70 years of the glamazon actress with screenings of 4K restorations and cinematic classics. Loook out for talks including Sophia Loren: Hollywood Italian Style as well as screening including: Good Folk’s Sunday (Anton Giulio Majano, 1953), Heller in Pink Tights (George Cukor, 1960), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Vittorio De Sica, 1963), Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966), Saturday, Sunday and Monday (Lina Wertmüller, 1990) and The Life Ahead (Edoardo Ponti, 2020).

Fresh from winning a Best Documentary Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, a fly-on-the-shattered-wall depiction of the brutal 2022 siege by Putin’s invading army, the insanely brave Ukrainian filmmaker-reporter Mstyslav Chernov has picked up his camera and found somewhere even more dangerous to go: a pencil-thin strip of blasted forest just outside the destroyed village of Andriivka in eastern Ukraine. The fields on both sides are sewn with landmines, making the task of capturing the village a forest crawl of hidden Russian bunkers, random shellfire and sudden death. Its vérité view of combat is intense and confronting. What makes it so impactful is the first-person nature of the footage – suddenly, the tools of modern warfare have become filmmaking tools too. It’s a groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

Championing ‘off-location electronic music events for the curious,’ Krankbrother are some of the country's most respected party-starters, and they’re in Finsbury Park for a series of events that'll get you moving to an intoxicating dance music soundtrack. This week, look out for sets from Honey Dijon, Horse Meat Disco, Kerri Chandler and British duo CamelPhat as well as plenty of street food, craft beer and cocktails. 

You’ve probably heard of ‘Instagram face’. This summer, Somerset House is dedicating a whole exhibition to things like the internet’s inclination for everyone to look exactly the same. In Virtural Beauty, Somerset House will explore the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The show will display more than 20 artworks from the 'Post-Internet' era, an art movement concerned with the influence of the internet on art and culture. It will feature sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance art, with highlights including ORLAN’s Omniprésence (1993), a groundbreaking performance in which the artist live-streamed her own facial aesthetic surgery, and AI-generated portraits by Minnie Atairu, Ben Cullen Williams, and Isamaya Ffrench. 

★★★★ 'Frameless has managed to create something genuinely exciting' - Time Out

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £24!

Get £24.80 tickets (originally £31) to Frameless, only with Time Out Offers.

The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after it originally debuted last year. The state of the country’s health and that of Nye himself are intwined from the start, as we open to the bed-ridden deputy leader of the Labour Party. It’s July 1960. We’re here, it’s increasingly clear, for the end of his life. Plunging us into Nye’s unconscious, Price gives us a dream-like portrait of his life. Sheen is predictably great at combining Nye’s burning sense of belief in welfare for all and his irascibility within a single scene. This play is a rallying cry for the power of empathy and bloody-minded humanitarianism.         

Emily Kam Kngwarray, an Anmatyerr artist from the Sandover region in the Northern Territory of Australia, didn’t start making art until she was 70. Her prolific and vibrant output during the ensuing decade paved the way for Aboriginal artists, women artists and Australian artists – and is the subject of this, her first major solo exhibition in Europe. Expect monumental canvases adorned with batik and acrylic patterns whose networks of dots and lines are almost immersive.

First-time playwright Shaan Sahota does a decent job of spinning an In The Thick of It-style yarn about Angad (Adeel Akhtar), a very junior British Sikh shadow minister who suddenly finds himself in play for the leadership of what is implicitly the Tory Party. The opening scenes thrum with an energy similar to a previous National Theatre triumph, James Graham’s This House, as it plunges us into an amusingly compromised world of sweary spads, cocky whips and malleable MPs. Helena Wilson is scene-stealingly entertaining as the apparently humble Angad’s shark-like head of comms Petra. It’s fun.

Another year, another spectacular line-up of classical music. In 2025, the orchestral extravaganza will feature 86 concerts across eight weeks, with over 3,000 artists taking to the stage, with the majority of the action taking place inside the grand surroundings of London’s Royal Albert Hall. This weekend, look out for an all-night prom running from 11pm to 7am featuring cellist Anastasia Kobekina, pianist Hayato Sumino and Norwegian ensemble Barokksolistene, a The Planets and Star Wars prom with music from John Williams’ Star Wars score and Holst’s The Planets and Edward Gardner conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Imagine indulging in all the dumplings, rolls, and buns you can handle, crafted by a Chinatown favourite with over a decade of culinary excellence. Savour Taiwanese pork buns, savoury pork and prawn soup dumplings, and luxurious crab meat xiao long bao. To top it off, enjoy a chilled glass of prosecco to elevate your feast. Cheers to a truly delightful dining experience at Leong’s Legend!

In Mansfield, the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov). The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. 

London’s newest major immersive experience is, as you would imagine from the title, all about Elvis Presley, and promises to offer a whirlwind two-hour tour through his life, building up to his classic ’68 comeback special. It comes from Layered Reality, the company behind the hit shows The War of the Worlds and the Gunpowder Plot, and ‘will use cutting-edge technology and live actors and musicians to deliver intimate moments that offer an insight into the man behind the myth’. 

Having premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 – and gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway – Girl From the North Country has lost none of its potency as it returns to the theatre where it all began — a dreamy, sepia-soaked production of character-driven vignettes and reimagined Bob Dylan songs. It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s actual birthplace – and the Great Depression is chewing through the soul of the town. At the centre is the Laine family, struggling to keep their guesthouse (and each other) from crumbling under debt, loss, and the weight of time. As we follow their story, we enter a world that feels like the inside of an old jukebox: full of half-remembered stories, crackling melancholy, and music that never quite stops playing.

The Arcola Theatre's alt-opera festival Grimeborn returns for its eighteenth year in 2025 and it’s as eclectic as ever, from a stripped back reworking of Wagner’s magnum opus Tristan und Isolde (Aug 13-16) to the first ever full staging of John Joubert’s final opera Jane Eyre (Aug 6-9)  and the return of last year’s bit of fun Sense & Senibility, The Musical (Aug 19-23) which is, you know, a bit more musical-y, and also last year’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which is, you know, bleak.

The balcony scene from Jamie Lloyd’s Evita is the biggest news to come out of the theatre world in years. People have been entranced by Rachel Zegler’s fame and the sheer ballsiness of Lloyd having her sing ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ for free to the good people of Argyll Street at 9pm each night from the London Palladium balcony. Opening the second half, the balcony sequence is a study in pure artifice. Clad in flowing white dress and an elegant blonde wig, Evita – now the First Lady – sings her great song of love and yearning for the country she’s cynically worked her way to the summit of.  But the Eva the outside audience sees is a lie: wig, dress and her sense of empathy are torn off before she returns to the stage. There is so much that is good about it – from Zegler, to the choreography, to the timely antifascist sentiment, to That Scene. It’s not just the London theatre event of the summer, but the London event of the summer full stop. 

London Palladium. Now until Sep 6. Buy tickets here. 

The Jamaican-born, London-raised photographer Dennis Morris is best known for his portraits of Bob Marley: a teenaged Morris, then a Hackney schoolkid, first photographed the reggae star in 1973. He went on to photograph the Sex Pistols and other reggae and punk icons, and there are plenty of stunning portraits of the likes of John Lydon and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in this hugely satisfying first UK retrospective of Morris’s work. Morris’s musical portraits are thrilling, but it’s his 1970s documentary work capturing Black and Asian life in Hackney and Southall that steals the show. They’re valuable, essential moments in time, capturing the capital at a point when Black British and British Indian communities were becoming well-established in some neighbourhoods but were anything but integrated or widely accepted. 

‘Intimate Apparel’ is a period drama, following a selection of characters in New York City, 1905. The story centres on Esther (Samira Wiley), a hard-working but shy and emotionally repressed Black seamstress who specialises in ‘intimate apparel’ – that is to say underwear, which in 1905 includes a lot of fancy corsets. Each of Lynn Nottage’s characters exists on some sort of margin, they’re all transgressing in each others’ spaces: they have intimate relationships more complicated than simple friendship. It’s a beautifully acted and exquisitely written drama about what happens when raw human longing is filtered through the strangeness of class, race and rulebound human society.

Us humans can be pretty selfish, and that’s especially true when it comes to design. It’s probably not something you’ve really thought about much before now (see, selfish!) but the world of design has historically neglected the needs of the animals, plants and other living organisms with whom we share our planet, in favour of catering to the whims and demands of us homosapiens. But not anymore. Created in collaboration with Future Observatory – the Design Museum’s national research programme championing new design innovations around environmental issues – this groundbreaking exhibition brings together art, design, architecture and technology to explore the concept of ‘more-than-human’ design, which embraces the notion that human activities can only flourish alongside those of other species and eco-systems. 

It’s a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O’Neill’s final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that’s more like an episode of Steptoe and Son. Maybe that’s down to director Rebecca Frecknall, who creates not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, fed up with dad Phil’s drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm. Frecknall turns the tilth on a half-buried play, and digs up something extraordinary.

Popping up each summer on the steps where the Regent’s Canal passes Granary Square, Everyman’s Screen on the Canal is one of the city’s best-loved outdoor cinemas. This year’s pop-up will be looking more Instagrammable than ever before, thanks to designer and architect Yinka Ilori, who has created an eye-popping screen design. Head down on a sunny afternoon to catch live coverage from Wimbledon every day of the tournament, plus the usual mix of live sports, classic movies, family-friendly flicks and recent hits.